Rob Portman: “I am here on the floor to talk about a significant step forward in holding China accountable for not playing by the…”

“I am here on the floor to talk about a significant step forward in holding China accountable for not playing by the rules. Today, after months of work, we are introducing bipartisan legislation called the Safeguarding American Innovation Act that will help crack down on the rampant theft of U.S. taxpayer-funded research and innovation at America's colleges and universities by foreign governments like China. It's outrageous, and it has to stop. At the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I chair, we conducted a bipartisan year-long investigation in 2019 into how China has used so-called talent recruitment programs, most notably its Thousand Talents Plan, to steal U.S. taxpayer-funded research. The Chinese Communist Party has systematically targeted the most promising U.S. research and researchers, and then paid these grant recipients to take their taxpayer-funded research to China. That research and technology often ends up going directly to China to help fuel the rise of its military and economy. Part of the reason it's gone on so long, frankly, is because we've been asleep at the switch. That's starting to change in the wake of our Subcommittee investigation. Right now, our law enforcement officials and other federal entities are working to hold China accountable for this IP theft problem but are limited in the actions they can take under current law.…”